‘Inferno’: Felicity Jones, other global stars join Tom Hanks mystery

“Inferno” is heating up.

Ron Howard’s third film based on the novels of Dan Brown has rounded out its cast with an international coterie of actors who will join franchise star Tom Hanks. The Oscar winner is reprising his role as the globetrotting, mystery-solving Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon after previous turns in “The Da Vinci Code” and “Angels & Demons.”

Omar Sy (“X-Men: Days of Future Past” and “The Intouchables”), Irrfan Khan (“Life of Pi”), Felicity Jones (“The Theory of Everything”) and Sidse Babett Knudsen (Danish TV’s “Borgen”) have all joined the film, Sony Pictures announced Tuesday.

Written by David Koepp, “Inferno” finds an amnesiac Langdon teaming up with a doctor (Jones) to recover his memories and prevent a madman from unleashing a global plague connected to Dante’s “Divine Comedy.” In other words, just another day at the office for Professor Langdon.

Knudsen will portray the head of the World Health Organization, Sy will play the leader of a disease prevention team, and Khan will play a shadowy string-puller known as the Provost.

Principal photography is to begin at the end of April, and the film is set to hit theaters Oct. 14, 2016.

Sony’s previous adaptations of Brown’s bestselling novels both performed well at the box office, although the franchise dipped noticeably in its second outing: 2006’s “Da Vinci Code” grossed $758 million worldwide, while 2009’s “Angels & Demons” took in $486 million.

The next movie in the series was originally intended to be based on Brown’s third Langdon novel, “The Lost Symbol,” but ultimately the studio shifted its focus to “Inferno.”

Though it’s a bit unusual for a film franchise to make movies out of order from the books’ publishing schedule, the Langdon movies have already done so -- “Angels” was published before (and on the page, takes place before) “Da Vinci.”

Presumably, the filmmakers could loop back to “The Lost Symbol” after “Inferno” if the latter proves successful -- and if it’s not supplanted by another Brown page-turner.

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